Street art gangs
Paula Alavesa, Timo Ojala · 2015
We present a location based mixed reality game called Street Art Gangs that we have developed to explore the playful appropriation of the hybrid reality comprising of a city center and its detailed virtual replica represented as a 3D virtual model. In the real streets SAG is played with a mobile phone app that allows tagging predefined locations around the city to claim their ownership and busting nearby players of competing gangs. The virtual game world is viewed with a PC app that allows observing the current owners of taggable locations, the locations of other players, and the locations of patrolling virtual policemen busting players. We have developed two incremental versions of SAG that have been evaluated with tournaments in the wild. We conceptualize the findings of the tournaments with de Souza e Silva's theoretical framework for hybrid reality games. Our findings suggest that players preferred to play the game on real city streets while the added value of the virtual game world remained marginal. The size of the game both in terms of area and the number of taggable locations turned out to have a major impact on gameplay.